Cementing relations

Author: Ian McEwan (b1948) was among the first group of students selected for Malcolm Bradbury's creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia, and the stories he worked on there formed his first published work, First Love, Last Rites (1975). The Cement Garden (1978) was his first full-length novel, and catapulted McEwan to the forefront - along with Martin Amis and Julian Barnes - of a new generation of British writers. McEwan produced novels at a regular rate - including a Booker prize-winner in Amsterdam (1998). McEwan has also been involved in script work - notably The Ploughman's Lunch (1985), and the traumatic experience that was The Good Son (1993), from which McEwan complained that he had been sidelined after Macaulay Culkin became involved.

The story: McEwan later commented: "What drove me was an impatience with the English fiction I read. It seemed like a polite talking shop of which I was no part." Four children live with their parents in an isolated house. The father dies while pouring cement in the back garden. Shortly afterwards, the mother dies too, of a mysterious illness. Scared that they will be taken into care, the orphaned children inter their mother's body in a tin trunk, also filled with cement. Their isolated situation allows their individual psychosexual traits to develop unchecked: the youngest boy starts wearing girl's clothes; the older daughter, Julie, gets involved with a 23-year-old man; the older boy, Jack, begins to develop an incestuous attachment to his sister. Eventually the cement holding the corpse cracks open, and Julie's boyfriend discovers the family secret.

Film-makers: Andrew Birkin (b1945) was Stanley Kubrick's assistant on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) before developing the BBC mini-series The Lost Boys (1978), a biographical treatment of JM Barrie and Peter Pan. (He also completed a book, JM Barrie and the Lost Boys, a year later). Birkin tried to get an adaptation of The Cement Garden off the ground in 1982, but it only happened after producer Bernd Eichinger, who had hired Birkin to write The Name of the Rose (1986), backed the film in 1991. Birkin cast his niece Charlotte Gainsbourg and his son Ned as two of the chidren; he also wanted his sister Jane to play the mother but she was already committed to directing her own film.

How book and film compare: Apart from the inevitable condensing of incident and detail, Birkin stays faithful to his source. He filmed in London's docklands in a deliberately anonymous environment (even removing a view of Canary Wharf building that had slipped unnoticed into a shot). However, Birkin, a former pupil of Harrow school, cast a young public schoolboy, Andrew Robertson, as Jack, thereby altering the social dynamic of the drama.

Inspirations and influences: The Cement Garden film gained much - in publicity terms at any rate - from the dubious morality surrounding Gainsbourg's father, Serge (notably the 1985 duet Lemon Incest). But Birkin developed a pioneering, affectless style to evoke "the private, amoral (or pre-moral) world that children create", as Philip French wrote in the Observer. Its direct descendants - though arriving via a different thematic route - are films like Larry Clark's Kids (1995) and Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2003), which also harnessed the studied, uninflected style to deal with adolescent experience.